Video gaming communities can be among the worst communities by far. There are communities that pride themselves on complaining and moaning at the developers (actually, that’s a majority of all communities), and some that pride themselves on a hypothetical superiority that the hardware they own is the only hardware that should be owned. I’m the strange guy who doesn’t care about the who, what, or when; I like to know why things happen. I like to see (or attempt to, anyway) why these things continue to happen after so many generations.
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Honestly, from my standpoint, I can’t even really call myself a gamer anymore, which is hilarious because I work as a reporter on a gaming forum. I spend all my hours doing research now and gaming has pretty much dropped off of the priority list. That probably skews my view on the way I see video gaming, but hey, since when is it wrong to have an opinion?
What kind of games do I play, you may ask? I play some computer games and mix it up with handheld stuff, but I don’t hate on any of the other console makers just because I don’t have their console. It annoys me because I would make a purchase, talk to some people about it, and then get laughed at completely because said item has no games, said item has inferior hardware, said item has an absurd price range with no real “payoff.” Why does that kind of stuff matter to some people so much when it works well enough for me?
I strongly believe that gaming should be just a recreation. I play an hour or two a week to take my mind off of the rigors of working as a researcher or from the toils of being a student in the science discipline. I don’t see the correlation of how I played games on a Nintendo console makes me have the mindset of a ten-year old gamer, or how the only real way to experience “true gaming” is by playing on a PC. I do not see that correlation whatsoever. I also don’t see how people can get so riled up over video gaming, but that’s a whole different beast to tackle for another day.
The way I see it, people (realistically) can only afford one option. Choosing one console of a set of different options makes it a difficult choice, and as of this generation’s consoles, they are getting much more expensive, so the choice has to be the right one. Nowadays, these consoles are the same. They push out games with impressive graphics and fancy hardware, but it just does not appeal to me anymore because of the lack of real innovative feel that we used to see in the nineties, things that made gaming consoles an absolute day one purchase. I look at the newest generation of consoles, and I’ll be damned, but I don’t see anything really noteworthy about making a purchase for. It’s starting to become like smartphones, where every new revision they get a slight spec bump, with a better graphics engine, better camera, and then becomes thinner. And for me, that’s where I see this divide coming from. There will always be a subconscious justification to make the purchase right. People have to make this difficult choice, and then they start inventing reasons why their purchase was the justifiable one. Is it a proven fact that with about $500 you can make a computer that can flatten all the current consoles? Sure, but why does it matter? It’s not wrong to want to feel like you made the wrong decision, but nobody wants to make the admission that they chose poorly. When I see these arguments about the Wii U having not reached its potential, sure, the facts say as much that the sales have been poor, or the games are being weakened in the face of better hardware, but there are still happy gamers who own their Wii U and have no problems with it at the end of the day. I don’t see the need to compare the Wii U to something like the PC; it’s like comparing apples to oranges. You can show me as many statistics or fact sheets as you want, but it doesn’t impact me because at the end of the day, gamers should be choosing what they want based on what appeals to them.
And then there’s the whole marketing thing. These big corporations play on us all the time, and hypothetically, they should be taking some of the blame for the plight that created this divide. The big corporations play on our weak emotions and then make big dollars out of us, and when one does better, they essentially rub it in the face of the other developers. Sounds cliché, but with that in mind shouldn’t these developers take a bit of the blame for the issues that plague gaming communities as of late?
So, if you’re just tuning in today, glad to see that you made it here! What do you think about this whole console/PC superiority complex that has gaming communities fighting constantly? Do you think that the idea of gaming communities being divided is a result of our own fabrications? If you’re one of the lucky few that has all of the latest consoles, what do you think about it, having experienced all the different methodologies that developers have provided? Let me know what you think in the comments below!
It just has key words and fancier vocabulary. 
